In many applications, active cooling of e.g. electronics circuitry is desirable or necessary. Typically such cooling is implemented as air cooling using mechanical fans or in more extreme cases water or other liquid cooling.
However, it has been proposed to also use air cooling based on acoustic coolers that generate an air flow. Indeed, it has been shown that in many applications such acoustic cooling is advantageous as a replacement for fans for reasons of efficiency and lifetime expectancy. For these applications, the acoustic cooler is optimized to cool as much as possible while still being quiet. An acoustic cooling is typically implemented as an acoustic transducer, such as a loudspeaker, which is optimized to generate an air flow rather than to produce sound. An example of such a cooler is disclosed in European Patent Application EP07122620.3.
However, for applications and systems that employ both acoustic cooling and output sound, conventional approaches require two different loudspeakers to be used for producing sound and an air flow respectively. Specifically, conventional acoustic cooling is optimized for efficient generation of air flows while maintaining quiet operation and they therefore tend to be very inefficient for producing sound.
Hence, an improved approach would be advantageous and in particular an approach allowing increased flexibility, improved air flow generation, improved audio generation, reduced complexity, facilitated implementation and/or improved performance would be advantageous.